Are your emotions affected by your email open rate?

Today I’m sharing my dead simple email send strategy designed to build subscriber engagement and keep you focused on what’s important when it comes to email.

Listen and you’ll instantly feel better in less than 10 minutes. Promise.

Hey there, it’s Susan Bradley. Now you’re on the roadmap to 50 K. You probably know already I’m building a brand new store and I’m doing it on Shopify and I’m actually bringing you along for the ride, showing you everything that I do. But today I’m actually just jumping in and I wanna share a strategy with you, something that’s really gonna help you out right now, and I wanna do it in 10 minutes or less. Welcome to the Roadmap to 50 K on Shopify. Each week we’ll take you behind the scenes of real stores where you’re going to learn actionable strategies and tips that will fast track the growth and profitability of your e-commerce business. So buckle up, welcome your host and Shopify expert, Susan Bradley. So Listen, if you are like me, you are perhaps building your store on a part-time basis. You know, I’m building my store on a really part-time basis. I wish I had actually a lot more time to spend on it, but the fact of the matter is that I don’t, and and you may know or you may not know, that I actually have quite a large group of, of e-commerce store owners just like us who are in my inner circle.

They follow the program. And part of our program is this really engaged, really amazing community on Facebook. And I feel really fortunate because I can, I get to see what’s going on in so many stores and talk to so many merchants. And, and of course there are questions that come up over and over again. And so I know that those are are common obstacles that that store owners face or things that really have them questioning whether they’re doing the right thing.

And that’s why I wanted to share one with you today because it’s come up time and time again, and it might help you develop your own strategy that works for you. And it’s all around email. You know, email is a huge part. Building lists is a huge part of what we do in the inner circle. And a member the other day created a post in our Facebook group that said that she really hesitates, she really hates emailing her whole list because her open rates are so abysmal and she’s afraid it’s going to affect her reputation as a sender. So here’s the thing with that, I, I thought it was important enough to address. And of course she got lots of answers. We have, I mean, so many smart merchants in there, and of course our coaches are in there and I’m in there.

But here’s the thing, there’s a problem with that. And so I wanted to help her flip her thinking on that. And I’m sure you may have that feeling too. You might be a little bit gun shy to email your whole list, but I wanna share with you my thinking on that. And I also wanna share with you my strategy, so maybe it will help you.

So first of all, my thinking is that you spend a lot of time and money building these lists, building email lists, building SMS lists, building money, chat lists, whatever list you’re building. And if you don’t, if you don’t get in front of the people on that list at least once a week, what happens is they just get colder and colder and colder.

And so if you never or seldom, or you only email or contact them once a month, I think that your chances of getting them to open an email or, or read your s m s your text message, whatever it is, I think the chances are they get slimmer as you go on. And so my feeling is that we need to, of course, we need to keep our list clean and that’s a topic for another day, but we have an obligation to ourselves to reach out to our list once a week. And here’s why I think that’s so important. And it’s because really not everything you send out is gonna be brilliant or genius or appealing to most of the people on your list. But, but if you send them out at least something once a week, the chances are that, you know, you give yourself a much better chance of sending out something that interests someone. And the way I structure my segments of my email list, I use clavio. Many, many of our members use Clavio. I really recommend it. And so I I just create two really simple segments. The first segment is a general segment, and the people on that segment have received an email from us once over the last 60 days. And they’ve opened an email zero times over the last 60 days. And they could be, have been on my email list for a long time and just not opened in the last two months, or they could have joined my email list yesterday and, and not opened.

But the bottom line is that that pool of people has not opened an email from me in 60 days. So that’s my first segment. I call that a general segment. And then I have another segment which I call an engaged segment. Again, super, super simple people who have received an email from us once, at least once in the last 60 days, and they have opened an email at least once in the last 60 days. So really the only difference between them and the general list is that they’ve opened an email once in the last 60 days. They could have joined my list yesterday and opened or joined it a year ago and opened one email in the last 60 days. And so I, we, you know, it’s our practice to send an email at least once a week or send a campaign. We actually send the email more than once, but it’s our practice to do this at least once a week. And, and I send my email into sends, first I send to the engaged segment, see how that subject line works with them, whatever subject line I use.

And generally my engaged segment gets an open rate of anywhere from 15% to maybe 35%. And if it’s a real dud, I know that I’ve got a bad, I’ve got a bad subject line so I can change it before I then just clone that campaign and I send it to my general segment. And that segment doesn’t get a great open rate. Like it might get a, I don’t know, 10%, 8%, 12%, somewhere around there. And, and I could let that bother me or I could just say to myself, well, my goal with this segment is to get people from the general segment and get them moved over to the engaged segment. That’s my goal. How many people from my general segment can I get moved over to my engaged segment and I do it every week.

And so I don’t look at it and say, oh, that’s a lousy open rate. I look at it and say, oh look, 120 people are on my engaged, you know, just got moved over to my engaged list now. And, and so every week I’m giving myself an opportunity to get some of those people who have not been engaged to get them engaged.

And so if you look at it that way as an opportunity to get enough content in front of people that something makes them take action and they, they go ahead and open your email and perhaps even click through and perhaps even buy. And what we know is if you never give yourself that opportunity and you’re not getting anything and you just wasted all your time and money trying to get them on your list.

So that’s the first thing that I wanted to talk about. But the other thing I wanted to mention to you is expectations of open and click. And when I asked this member, okay, well what’s your open rate that’s abysmal? And she said 18%. And I was like, well actually that’s not abysmal. I hate to break it to you. That’s pretty good for your whole list.

You know, when you’ve got the general segment people and the engaged segment people altogether, it’s not about open rate. And what I try and keep in mind, and you might wanna just park these numbers and they’ll make you feel better probably, is that what you’re looking for really is overall for all the email you send, whether it’s your funnels and flows or your campaigns or your abandoned cart series, all of those things, if you can maintain a higher than a 10% open rate and a 2% click rate, you’re okay. Some is gonna be better than others, but if you’re consistently below 10%, then we need to have a look. But if you are, and you know those flows and funnels, they usually get way higher, like 30 or 40% open rates.

But what you’re looking for is over your whole account to stay in in the email good books, you’re looking for a number that’s 10% or higher for an open rate. So that’s what I’ve got. Think about how you can apply this to your business, give it a whirl. Just create those two segments. Send the engaged first. Check your open rates if it’s good, the subject line’s good, and go ahead and then send it to your general segment. And I would love it if you would report back. See you soon guys. Hey, listen, if you like what we’re working on here at the Roadmap to 50 K and it’s helping you get clarity on your next steps, I think you really have to check out our inner circle.

You know, it is just an amazing place to learn how to build your business the right way, and you get to do it with a wonderful group of store owners that support each other and will cheer you on. You know, in the Inner circle, our only purpose is to help our members get results. And because of that, we actually have dedicated coaches that are fully trained and available to work one-on-one with you.

And we offer that to our members at crazy affordable prices because I know that sometimes you just need a little extra help to get past a roadblock so that you can move on and make progress again. So if this sounds good to you, I want you to head on over to the social sales girls.com/inner circle and get on the wait list. We will send you a lesson so that you can see what’s waiting for you on the inside.

And we’ll also invite you to join us the next time we are open to take new members. So listen, friends, that’s all, thank you so much for spending your time with me and I will see you next week.